Emulating a Floppy Drive By Emulating The Drive Itself

What happened

The Commodore 1541 is famously the floppy drive for the Commodore 64 series of 8-bit computers, and can be found with relative ease. Instead it’s the same 6510 and ROM you might have found on the original, talking to a Pi Pico emulating the drive hardware.

It’s a gloriously over the top solution to the problem of emulating a disk drive, the reason being that it started life as a daughter board plugged into an original drive mainboard. Not so well known is its 1551 sibling — the drive made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 machines.

They’re particularly rare in 2026, so [Maciej Witkowiak] has made an emulator . Complementing the Pico is a CPLD for glue logic, and an OLED for selecting disk images.

Key facts

• Instead it’s the same 6510 and ROM you might have — found: on the original, talking to a Pi Pico emulating the drive hardware